lock down features

From: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>

To: desktop-devel-list gnome org

Subject: lock down features

Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 23:00:35 -0500

Hi,
We should consider a feature allowing people to lock down various
parts of the desktop.
Part of this is simply honoring the writability or nonwritability of
gconf keys, which some things don't do properly right now. We should
fix those things.
There are two reasons that isn't quite enough:
- gconf doesn't currently let you mark a directory not writable,
so e.g. you can't lock down all possible entries in /apps/metacity
(should be fixed really)
- sometimes what we want to lock won't correspond to a preference
Anyhow, I think we may want some settings like this:
/desktop/gnome/capabilities/can_run_commands
/desktop/gnome/capabilities/can_edit_menus
/apps/panel/capabilities/can_change_applets
So e.g. if can_run_commands is FALSE, you can't open the Run Command
dialog or do other things that allow you to start up a command. Apps
would optionally be able to honor this setting. This isn't related to
a preference.
If can_edit_menus is false, you can't edit menus in nautilus or via
other means.
You get the idea.
What do people think? How should we implement this?
Havoc